Troubled by the ferry's pitch and heave, Hillary lies awake in her dormitory capsule surrounded by a hive of snoring women. She doubts that her father Chris ever turned in. His nose is probably smudging a window as he watches the night's waves, loving every moment.
It's shy of four a.m., the hour Chris used to begin his daily video scrum with his East Coast colleagues. Looking back at it now, there were signs of burnout long before he quit his job. Arriving home from school, Hillary would find a dress shirt shed outside the doorway to his office, the man himself splayed on the TV-room couch embracing a pillow as he binged first-person videos of Japanese train, bus, and ferry journeys. Yes, he told her, seeing through her proxy question. Tell your mom I'm still taking my meds. There's a chance his burnout and the travel videos have no connection to their being here, now. But for Hillary, Chris's infatuation with Japan remains the first sign of his early-onset manopause.
The day Chris quit work, he stripped his home office bare, except for the addition of a new sunrise-orange zafu and zabuton that filled the room with the scent of dry buckwheat. The kitchen counter, where Chris's devices usually charged, became the resting place for library books: novels, history tomes, volumes on gardening, science, real estate, and mindfulness. The foundation of his former life took up half the garage: the office standing desk, the filing cabinets, computer equipment, office chair, even the broken TV with enough scratches around the screw holes in back to make Hillary suspect he'd sabotaged it as part of his plan to go cold turkey on whatever it was he no longer wanted to be a part of. All of this sat next to her late grandfather's medical equipment: the walker, the wheelchair, the shower stool, the unopened boxes of adult diapers, wipes, and nitrile gloves.
Hillary, finishing up her senior year in high school, began to notice the pale flash of Chris's palms, his fingers no longer clattering on a keyboard, or holding his phone or a computer mouse or a remote. He was outdoors more often, too, usually with a rake or a hoe in hand, or handling Asian vegetables from the farmers' market that he'd pluck from the wire basket of his secondhand bicycle with the step-through frame, the bike far too small and—along with his shaggy hair and new, untrimmed beard—lending him the appearance of a man who'd mugged a woman on her produce run.
In her capsule, Hillary senses her worries circulating through her head, a current strengthening. How is Chris's unemployment affecting his finances, including his ability to help pay for her college tuition in the fall, when she starts as a business major? There must be money saved up somewhere if he can afford to not work for half a year, if he can afford this trip to Japan, a graduation present she never asked for that began with a flight, then a train ride, then a bus ride, and now this ferry. She wonders where his crack-up will take him, and whether it's hereditary. Will she have to care for him one day, as he did for his father? She hates her mother a little for divorcing Chris, for how easily she stepped out of the responsibility of future care. Of course, they split for other reasons, long before. Nevertheless.
Hillary has snooped in Chris's notebook and found his recent entries to be full of questions.
- How do gas pumps survive the winter? Is there a heater in there to keep the credit card reader and the receipt-printing mechanism from seizing up in the cold?
- What are the names of the plants we have growing around the house? Which insects do they support?
- What's the temperature difference in tap water between the height of summer and the depths of winter?
With every jotted question, Hillary feels the workaholic, macro-obsessive, multitasking, podcast-listening specimen of middle-age that is Chris breaking down into these childlike states of wonder. Whether this is the result of a breakdown, or an effort to prevent one whose outlines she can't imagine, Hillary doesn't know.
Passing the time until dawn, Hillary lies in her capsule and thinks of everything her father has been unaware of in the world since he abandoned news and screens at the beginning of the year. It is a tsunami of awfulness, one wave after another. Maybe Chris is on to something.
As quietly as she can, Hillary slips out of the ferry company's provided pajamas and puts on yesterday's clothes. She pulls up the honeycomb-hued roller blind at the capsule's opening and slides into the complimentary slippers. She holds the handle of the dormitory door until it latches quietly behind her, then sees, framed by warm artificial light, a window of sky and sea the hue of the mold in blue cheese.
She checks the gym, but Chris isn't there. She stands outside the swaying curtained doorway to the men's baths and calls his name, but no one answers. She has a quick stabbing sense that he's jumped overboard in the night. The imagined act makes her feel utterly alone. But then she finds him in the cafe's seating area. Breakfast service hasn't begun yet, but he's bought himself a bottle of ginger tea from a vending machine. His hair and beard are damp and hold the path of his comb's teeth, as though he really did jump into the sea but then changed his mind and climbed back aboard. It's not lost on Hillary that his head is probably in better shape than hers. She blames the jet lag.
"We have the ship to ourselves," he says as she takes a seat across from him.
"Did you mean what you said last night, about buying a house here?"
He smiles and taps the cover of the notebook at his side. "Already did. A place in the countryside. Whole villages are dying out, so the homes are going for a song. There's a forest you can walk in forever. What do you think?"
"Chris."
"There's a stream nearby, too. I'm told you can hear the water at night, like a lullaby."
He taps his bulging notebook, and she feels that to open it would reveal not the paperwork of his purchase, but a pop-up illustration of the house rising from two dimensions into its true form, the roof spreading its wings and settling on rising walls, trees springing forth on hillsides rising nominally behind the scene, even a pull-tab to make the water of the stream move back and forth. He used to make her simple pop-up books when she was young, back in his stay-at-home-dad years.
"Chris. You didn't buy a house. Are you still taking your meds?"
"Your mother isn't here, you know."
She stares at him.
He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out his travel pill case and shakes it like a maraca. "You can have your own bedroom whenever you visit, you know."
"Even if you did buy a house, what about work?"
"I'm taking a hiatus from the rat race, Hill. Maybe for good."
Hillary can sense that the taut guy wires that have held her father down have sprung for good. There's no longer any child support to pay, and there's no reason to keep renting the house for only one person. By moving out for college, she is leaving him free to totter. She can find no sensible reason for Chris not to move, either, except that it's Japan, the other side of the ocean, where he knows no one. Has he thought how she'd feel without him being at least in the same hemisphere? Was she now going to start doing alternate Thanksgivings and Christmases in Japan? She's dizzy with the maelstrom of new worries and checks herself, again.
"You didn't buy a house," she says.
Chris smiles and puts the bottle of green tea in front of her. It's sealed, warm. This small kindness fills Hillary with longing. Not to go back to an earlier time between them. Not even to pause this moment, exactly. She doesn't want the impossible, only for things to slow, to move at half-speed for a while. She knows that, at best, there lies only a solid month or two of time remaining between them for the rest of their lives, no matter how long those lives are. If it's to be more, it could be the same thing that happened with Grandpa, and she's left to care for him. Or perhaps she fails in life, or life fails her, and she needs to move back in with him.
She wonders if his teaching her to call him by his first name, from the moment she could talk, was an early step in weakening the bonds of dependence.
"I love you, Dad," she says.
"I love you, too, daughter," he says. He gives her a smile, then looks out the window where the color of everything is still gray-blue.
They disembark at ten that morning after a motley breakfast of croissants, udon, and soft-serve ice cream. They take a slow bus, then an impossibly fast train, then an even slower bus that heaves up a winding road bordered with thick woods. She doesn't know what's happened in the world over the past two days of travel, but she has the past to project from. Here, though, she hasn't a clue about the people, history, or politics of the area. Everything is unknown. She doesn't even have a sense of the value of the coins in her pocket, sitting tight like buttons under the denim of her jeans.
It's growing dark when they arrive at the village. They roll their suitcases down a side lane where the edges are buried under growth she doesn't have the name for. They come upon a house set against a dense hillside, a concrete walk stained dark with age. The door is unlocked. Someone has been inside and turned on a lamp. In the middle of the room are two folded cushions, a paper sack filled with large aromatic peaches, and the word
W E L C O M E written in thin strokes on a long strip of paper. Hillary can smell generations of time, hundreds of meals, thousands of days and nights. She runs her fingers along the cracks in the dusty walls.
"Wabi-sabi," her father says, simply.
Exhausted, Hillary picks up a futon mattress and takes it upstairs to an empty room where she lies down. She can hear the gurgling of the stream she has yet to see in person. The sound is pleasant and endless and drowns her in sleep.
She wakes hungry and steps downstairs to the main room. Her father has written "Out exploring" on the long piece of paper. She sees his bag in the corner, his notebook. She opens it and finds a rental agreement for the duration of their one-week stay. He didn't buy the place. She's not sure she's relieved.
She grabs the sack of peaches, but the wet sides tear away from the bottom, sending the fruit tumbling free. She takes a dry peach out back where there is a small gravel yard that leads into woods. There's a start-stop noise from somewhere nearby, a compressor running. But she can also hear unseen birds with calls that are unfamiliar to her. She hunches forward after the first bite, the fruit's juice dripping from her lips. The peach is overripe, but she keeps eating, wiping her chin with the back of her hand and then placing the pit in the middle of a table, where a dry one already sits.
She walks in the direction of a clump of roofs, passing a house being pressure-washed, and then a few more homes with small gardens, some looking abandoned, some heavy with vegetables she doesn't recognize. There's a market at the end of the lane and there she adds to a basket what they will need for the day. She spots Chris with his own basket leaving an aisle. He doesn't see her as he walks to the checkout. Hillary watches him place his items on the counter: a bottle of ginger tea, a carton of eggs, milk, a box of cereal, a couple of ready-to-eat meals. From where she stands, it looks like he's having a conversation with the checker. He bags his own groceries, pays, returns the plastic basket, and walks out with a wave. He doesn't speak or read the language, he's never been here before, but he manages this small act of domesticity as though he's home. Hillary finishes her shopping and tries to be as equally at ease, but she fumbles at the checkout and ends up handing over her credit card and letting the checker handle the transaction.
Back at the house, she places the food she's bought alongside Chris's. He's not there. She heads toward the sound of water. The path underfoot is soft and leads along the silvery band of the stream she heard last night. The water is surprisingly warm to the touch. She continues under the trees and sees her father in the distance, soaking in a natural hot tub, a steaming washcloth draped over his head. His clothes sit neatly arrayed on a dry rock.
The strangeness of this place, and of seeing her father soaking in the water, has unveiled her impending future—the moving out, the years in college, her future career—as simply a string of possible stories of how her life might proceed. How difficult would it be to delay what feels inevitable and take a pause? Maybe she and Chris can tackle some of the questions in his notebook. They can figure out where the stream finds its water and where it delivers it. If it changes temperature during the year. What animals drink from it.
She wonders if her father's transformation began with an innocent thought like this, one that changed the direction of the following day and the days that followed, a tiny angle whose arc can hold within it an entirely different life, if you let it.
"Not too warm?" she asks, when she's in earshot.
Her father draws down the washcloth and then she sees it's not her father at all, but another, older man. That she doesn't know her father well enough to not mistake him for this man with fogged glasses and a thin mustache, for her to believe this man's bare shoulders were her father's, makes her feel hot and foolish. She apologizes and turns back and meets Chris halfway to the house. He's in flip-flops and carrying a towel.
"Did you find the hot spring?" he says.
"Yeah."
"Grab a towel and join me. Shinrin-Yoku. Forest bathing is supposed to do wonders."
"You're taking it too literally," she says.
Because she's embarrassed to return to the pool, Hillary heads toward the rental house. Once she sees it, she goes from being on the cusp of hating the house to hating it. She hates the outside. She hates the inside. The worn floor, the cracks in the wall, the smell of this place that will sit here until it falls apart, here, where nothing ever happens, where it takes a plane and a train and a bus and a ferry and another bus to reach this place that even ghosts have abandoned. It's not her father's home or, one day, a home for her to inherit. And it's this she hates the most: that she allowed herself to grow both morbid and hopeful at once with the thought that she could go through life knowing she had this place in Japan that was hers—or would be, one day.
Instead, their stay will be over in days. There'll be another bus, ferry, bus, train, and plane ride, and then will follow the horde of things needing to be done as she moves out of the house and into her life. She finds Chris's meds and takes one. She doesn't do it often. Only when necessary, like now. She sits down on one of the room's only chairs, there at the small round table whose edge has carved a groove in the wall. She looks at the papers on the table. They are foreign to her but for Chris's name listed once, twice, fifteen times. One page is a simple surveyor's map of the properties on the street, each outline with a Japanese character in the center. She can see the path of the stream, and the house they're in, and also another one that's highlighted, four houses down. She recognizes the Yen symbol. A sum. There is a second set of pages with an English translation.
"Holy shit," she says.
Once outside, she runs. The house in question looks nearly the same as the rental. There is a man outside dressed all in green, including a green cap and green rubber boots. He's pressure-washing the walls, leaving clean bright streaks with every pass of the piercing water, years of grime dribbling down and into the dirt. The front steps to the house have already been washed, the cement looking like it cured yesterday.
The man has stopped spraying and says something to her. English, Japanese—she can't tell over the noise of the compressor. The air is warm and fragrant. Unstoppable light fills the sky and licks the dripping water from the edges of the eaves.
"Yes," she says, and nods, and he nods and gives her a smile, and in she goes, into her father's house.
